Eugene Vodolazkin writes on using the language of the past to construct new meaning for the present, and the medieval and postmodern influences for his new novel Laurus.
Read MoreMaidan: one year on
Andrey Kurkov, Vice-President of Ukrainian PEN, reports on his country’s revolution and counter-revolution after the first year
Read MoreThe Red Terror and Maximilian Voloshin
Robert Chandler writes about one of the hidden gems in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Read MoreYou speak such good German
Alina Bronsky, Russian-born but writing in German, charts the challenges and opportunities faced by the multilingual author
Read MoreLife and Fate Redux
Robert Chandler writes from the first Russian conference on Vasily Grossman, author of the monumental Life and Fate,
Read MoreSoldier No. 9
Andrey Kurkov reports on the latest news from Ukraine,
Read MoreKiev’s Militant Spring
Alexei Nikitin writes for PEN Atlas about the tense atmosphere in Kiev, where the café-goers listening to jazz and the remaining protesters on the Maidan barricades await further news from the east of the country
Read MoreThe apricot border with Russia, or separatism on Skype
With the growing troubles in Ukraine, poet and dramatist Liubov Iakymchuk writes for PEN Atlas
Read MoreWorld War III: a dress rehearsal
In another exclusive dispatch from Ukraine, Andrey Kurkov describes the atmosphere of tension and surreality in Kiev and Crimea
Read MoreRussian déjà vu at Sochi 2014 – who lost the games?
Mikhail Shishkin writes our second PEN Atlas dispatch on the Sochi Winter Olympics,
Read MoreWhat is the real cost of the Sochi Winter Olympics?
Hamid Ismailov investigates the underside of the Sochi Olympics for PEN Atlas: while the Western media focuses on LGBT rights, there is also the shocking unheard story of migrant labourers held in captivity, mercury and uranium deposits from construction work, jingoism, corruption and worse
Read MoreThe duty to write
Journalist-turned-freedom-fighter Mikail Eldin writes for PEN Atlas on his experience of the Chechen wars
Read MoreWorlds apart: Russia online and offline
In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Arkady Babchenko writes on freedom of speech, media and the internet in Russia
Read MoreThe Debut Generation
In Soviet times there was a concept known as ‘young writers’. It was in fact a class concept. A budding writer was expected to descend from the working class and to glorify the Soviet regime. All facilities were provided for this purpose, such as the Gorki Literary Institute, founded to teach workers creative writing.
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